this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Is that cherenkov radiation or is the camera and film melting?
Is that Cherenkov radiation, or are you just happy to see me?
I'm so happy to see you, I'm positively glowing!
Yes.
Also, this wouldn't produce an explosion. There is a MASSIVE difference between supercritical and bomb levels of prompt-critical.
Reactors are generally by design not even capable of supercritical without many things going wrong, let alone prompt-critical.
What about the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom!
The reactor didn't have a pointy tip so it bounced off the ground.
Sorry Marvin, but nuclear armament is a far cry from Earth shattering!
You forgot about Project Sundial
Ideas are not the same as possibilities.
Also, the Earth takes hits bigger than that. Even the Tonga eruption was about 10 megatons of energy.
The Chicxulub impact is estimated to be around 100 trillion tons of tnt equivalent. 10000x bigger than Sundial was even proposed.
Chicxulub did not shatter the Earth.
Project Sundial was 10 gigatons, so, 10,000 Tongas.
I’m t was enough to ignite all of metropolitan FRANCE if detonated at an altitude of 45km.
The earth would survive, sure, but I’m pretty sure there would be significant global effects.
Well yea, it killed off the dinosaurs, who survived on the planet tens of thousands of times longer than humans. It was catastrophic.
Still not Earth shattering, though.
Project Sundial wasn't just theoretical. We had the ability, the materials, and the technical knowledge to build it. The political will faltered and blinked.
You know how you can absolutely verify that? We built it in thousands of different bombs rather than just one big one.
If we had made a 10 gigaton device where it was supposed to be located in eastern California, or western Nevada, blowing that up would have created a massive crater that probably would have measured at least 30 miles in diameter, and all of the US would die in the first blast. Normally when talking about nuclear or fusion weapons I would call the US citizens the lucky ones, because we wouldn't have to live with the consequences. In this case, all of humanity is lucky, and basically no one survives the blast shockwave. The shockwave would circle the globe multiple dozens of times. No one that isn't in a fortified bunker will survive the 1000 mph winds that would cause. Those winds would sandblast the surface almost smooth.
This is a world ending bomb. Half the planet's crust would be molten for decades if not centuries. It would probably be the first mass extinction event that kills off more than 99.9% of all species. 10 gigatons is about 1/4-1/5 the amount of energy that Theia imparted to Proto-Earth which created two moons for a very short period of time, and made the entire planet molten for another 1/4 billion years.
Oh, and I agree with Teller on this one. He, correctly in my view, assumed that the end game of fusion weapons was a way to end all life on Earth, and designed the endgame. I think we were very stupid to split that up into massive stockpiles that, "maybe we could use one or a few, but not all of them." That's far too big of a risk for normal humans. Someone will use them again if they are as small as they are.
lol no. It would not kill all of the US. At all. In any way. It would be 10000x smaller than Chicxulub. Which also did not instantly wipe off that large of an area.
It would not be great for the climate, but it is in absolutely no way a "world ending bomb".
Sure. I'm gonna believe you, a rando on the net, rather than my experience as a Navy Nuclear Power Program Electronics Technician Instructor.
Fuck off. You don't have any clue about what you are talking about.
rofl clown.
Even the most basic search results will prove you wrong by many orders of magnitude...
I can understand respecting the crazy scale of nukes. Though Earth is much bigger than your tiny brain could ever begin to fathom.
That was a fusion device though
You're not thinking big enough. ;)
Nah, there's literally not enough nukes or even fissile material to make an Earth-shattering bomb. It takes a lot of energy to shatter something the size of Earth.
Not enough fissile material on earth. With enough asteroid and planetary mining, and .... ah never mind. You are probably still right. "Shattering" implies breaking apart and defeating earth's gravity well.
We'll have to get started on antimatter bombs for the required energy density, I guess.
Correct. Even with perfect conversion of mass to energy, it would still take converting the mass equivalent of a 16+ km asteroid directly into energy.
Even antimatter explosions are not anywhere near 100% efficient. They produce many subatomic particles with high energy. Much of the reaction will quickly (on the order of 1x10^-16 seconds (... ok ok pions take 1x10^-8 seconds to decay, which is much longer)) settle into neutrinos or electrons. About half of the energy would nigh-instantly convert to neutrinos. Neutrinos will not care or contribute to ripping Earth apart even if they're produced in the Earth's core.
What are your recomendations? Assuming Earth had to be shattered in a kaboom.
A very large asteroid (>500km) would be a good attempt at 'shattering'. (much like how the moon formed, in theory) Otherwise, a "small" black hole or other cosmic-scale forces would do the trick. A near by blazar would easily sterilize the planet if it were aimed at us, but there are none such objects we have yet observed. (luckily)
The sun itself is easily capable of smearing Earth out, but the real question is "how?". Even a crazy CME aimed directly at Earth would barely be able to wipe out technology, let alone life. A close call with another solar system would definitely stand a solid chance of wiping out life as we know it, but it wouldn't necessarily be terribly quick.
It'd be very predictable in that we'd be able to see another solar system coming for decades/centuries/longer, and many changes would still be longer than a human lifespan (outside of the final 'kick' event, which could be over in a matter of weeks/months and leave the surface freezing and potentially devoid of much atmosphere).
So we can consider our sun dying and Andromeda colliding with the milky way as crappy backstops.5 billion years for a maybe is not great. I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of patience. We need fresh ideas. I like your singularity idea, but getting crushed isn't as artistically coherent as a quality shattering and if you've checked the price of singularities these days, its not really in the budget.
I think the most viable option I've heard so far is a mega asteroid. Do you know any suitable candidates for rent?
Well there's always Ceres (~945km), Pallas (~512km), or Vesta(~525km), though they're more dwarf planet than asteroid, so that might be pretty pricy to aim at Earth.
There are several asteroids in the 200-500km range (5-10 if you're lucky), but not too many. It seems Earth shattering is a pretty premo business in this solar system!
Deep core mining is the real tech we need. Blow up a 10 gigaton device on the surface and you'll melt a hemisphere of the upper layer of the crust and create a 30 mile diameter crater. Bury that baby 5,000 miles into the planet and blow it up? The Earth is gonna need help opening it's ketchup bottles for a few billion years until it reforms, potentially around the moon which I suppose would actually stabilize the moon's orbit, but would probably make neo-Earth uninhabitable.
lol no. 10 gigatons is a yawn to the Earth. It's still 14 orders of magnitute too weak to blow up the Earth. That's trillions of times less than what it would take to "blow up" the Earth, and 10000x less than Chicxulub, which the Earth already survived.
You are, again, orders of magnitude off, and have no clue what you are talking about. I'm an actual nuclear power scientist, so yeah. I'm gonna ignore all the lies you tell from now on.
rofl you are an ignorant fool, then. Seriously, you are genuinely stupid if you think something 10000x smaller than chicxulub would make half the planet molten.
Seriously, you are a joke and should be fired if you work in any related industry...
Ladies, Gentlemen, Nuclear Engineers, Aliens bent on conquest and demi-gods or demons bent on wrath and destruction; Look, we have a job to do. The earth probably isn't going to shatter on its own. At least not with that attitude. We need teamwork. Collaboration. Hard math. Next, next-next-next-gen explosives and a lot of them.
We can do this!
The bigger problem is Earth is gooey at scale. Seriously, the mantle, which is most of Earth's mass, is gooey rock. "shattering" as if it were solid simply isn't going to happen. Most of the Earth is like thick caramel or worse as far as "shattering" is concerned.
The best you could hope for is something like how the moon formed; an impact (very) roughly 10x less than the gravitational binding energy of the Earth itself (which is crazy in and of itself!). If you'll note, the Earth 'survived' that impact, but was forever changed in significant ways.
What's even crazier, is that Earth had single celled organisms growing on it less than 500 million years later! For reference, the oldest mountain ranges are 2-3x older in relative terms.
If you blow it up on the surface or in the atmosphere, sure. Blow up a 10 gigaton device, which we absolutely can make and have the materials to do so, buried as deep as you can possibly get it, so about 1.5-1.6 miles in the crust, and you're gonna wreck a significant portion of a hemisphere.
Especially since U-238 is one of the most abundant elements in the crust. Literally every single shovel full of dirt that you pick up has several hundred to several million atoms of U-238
lol no. Genuinely, no. You are a clueless fool playing with numbers you cannot comprehend.
Even earthquakes within recorded history have released more energy than 10 gigatons. By an order of magnitude.
You are seriously a fool that does not begin to fathom the scale of Earth.
Look up how much energy the Valdivia, Chile earthquake in 1960 released and get back to me. Again, you petulant child failing to comprehend the topic...
Maybe it was in a Vegetable Glycerin reference.
What if you close it really hard like a diesel piston? Surely that's deserving of a bang!
You'd have to use enough energy to compress it a lot. The kinds of energy where you wouldn't even need the core there to utterly obliterate something the size of the Titanic.
You greatly underestimate my strength. *smashes fingertips between Demon Core halves*
The white lines support the second hypothisis